SunRocket.com: the website that STILL won't die

I took that grab at 5:31 p.m. Pacific Time, on Friday September 14. Let me tell you how I got there.

While clearing out some websites from my IE Favorites list earlier today, I decided to see what was up with the online presence for the crashed-and-burned, formerly-200,000-subscriber, Internet phone service SunRocket.

The landing page was pretty much as expected: a notice of closure (although still referring to complete shutoff of August 5 as being in the future). And the tabs for such sections as Products & Services, Features, Availability, etc. appear to have been disabled. Click on those tabs and you just stay on the landing page.

But hey guess what. When you go directly to an internal link for any of those tabs, the page you land on seems to be a frozen moment in time. For example, going to: http://www.sunrocket.com/services/plans/ gets you to the old Products & Services page. I've screencapped that page at the top of this post.

Since everyone knows SunRocket is long gone, you might be wondering what the issue is. Well, at least theoretically, a Web user and potential SR customer who had bookmarked that page as a favorite for later retrieval might be confused by what he or she sees? Has SR been revived? Of course not, but the point is those pages should have been stripped from the server.

So why are these internal links still up on the SunRocket ghost site?

I'll bet what happened was: Sherwood Partners, who is handling SR's dissolution, got a hold of a Web developer or coder and told him or her to post the obit on the home page and unlink the home page tabs from the internal pages. That's probably the extent of the work order the webdev received. In a matter of incompleteness informed by haste and other, higher priorities, the order was never transmitted to take down the internal pages.

Sloppily done...